As the top-shelf tap dancer Michelle Dorrance sees it, “Shift.,” the show that her company is debuting at the Joyce Theater this week, isn’t exactly a tribute to Gene Medler, her foremost teacher and mentor.
“It’s not about him, it’s because of him,” she said after a recent rehearsal. “I hope to honor the way he taught us.”
The education Dorrance had in mind went way beyond tap. “It’s not just how he inspired us to approach our art form, but the way he thinks about life,” she said. “It’s the community he created and how he charged us to care for each other.”
Medler’s pupils tend to talk about him similarly: as a second father, a role model, a joking but Yoda-like guru. The most prominent of them include Dorrance and several members of her company, Dorrance Dance, as well as Jared Grimes, a tap virtuoso whose performance in “Funny Girl” on Broadway earned him a Tony Award nomination.
“There’s not a day that goes by,” Grimes said, “that I don’t think of Gene’s contribution to who I am.”
In the 1990s, Dorrance and Grimes were members of the North Carolina Youth Tap Ensemble, which Medler founded (under a different name) in Chapel Hill in 1983. The internationally touring ensemble of tap dancers, aged 8 to 18, became one of the best tap training grounds in the world.
Medler, 75, prefers to stay behind the curtain, and because of Parkinson’s disease, he doesn’t give interviews anymore. (He responded to emailed questions.) But his students are eager to speak for and about him, often quoting his catchphrases, like “Dance to express, not to impress” and “Form follows function.”
“He’s talking about figuring out what you need to do to create the music you want to hear, and leaning into that,” said Elizabeth Burke, a Dorrance dancer who was with the youth ensemble from 1999 to 2010.
Luke Hickey, another member of Dorrance’s company, whose 2004 to 2014 tenure with the ensemble overlapped with those of his three siblings, noted Medler’s “student mind-set.” Medler started tap late, at 28, and, Hickey said, “He was always up front and honest about his own development and being a slow learner.”
Medler would share with his students techniques and ideas that he hadn’t yet mastered, letting them all figure it out together. “That made us feel OK about whatever level we were at,” Hickey said, “and it allowed us to soar.”
In high school, Medler was an athlete: baseball, track and field. At the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, he was a varsity fencer. After college, some friends asked him to be in a movie they were making. “My character was supposed to be learning to tap dance,” he recalled in an email. “And so I got an LP with ‘teach yourself to tap’ instructions. I was hooked.”
It wasn’t long before he was teaching tap to children, eventually at the Ballet School of Chapel Hill (founded by Gretchen Vickery and Dorrance’s mother, M’Liss Dorrance). That’s where he started the youth ensemble, which is referred to by the acronym NCYTE — pronounced “insight.”
As Medler began to attend the tap festivals that emerged in the 1980s, he learned about and from legends like John Bubbles and Charles (Honi) Coles, and younger innovators like Brenda Bufalino. From the 1990s on, he took his students to the festivals — to meet elders and peers, soak up tradition and perform. In 1999, he started his own North Carolina Rhythm Tap Festival, bringing the greats to Chapel Hill.
The youth ensemble he developed was far from kid stuff. When Hickey was a member, he said, he knew more than 40 pieces. Many were by Medler, but many were commissioned works by masters like Bufalino and Savion Glover — or by former members who were becoming masters, like Dorrance. Most performances were at schools and retirement communities, but they eventually expanded to stages in Mexico, Brazil, Europe and China.
Hickey called the ensemble “a self-cleaning, self-organizing mechanism.” Older members were responsible for teaching the repertoire to younger ones. At shows, performers had to introduce and explain the work and history to the audience — which sometimes meant, terrifyingly, that elementary school students were lecturing high schoolers.
Medler also introduced improvisation much earlier than tap teachers generally do. It was part of how he taught about musical form, interacting with musicians and taking risks.
“He treated us like adults, like he knew we could handle it,” Burke said. “That gave us so much agency and confidence.”
Over the years, when people asked Medler his pedagogical secret, he frequently offered the same answer: “I teach them everything I know, open all the doors that I can and get out of their way.”
In 2022, Medler, who didn’t take a salary as director of the ensemble, handed the reins to the dancer Emily Shoemaker, an alum, who receives a stipend. But Medler was present at this year’s tap festival, where he watched as Burke and Hickey passed on his ideas.
“Whenever a lightbulb turned on in a student’s eyes,” Hickey said, “you could see the joy in Gene’s.”
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